So another pseudoscience article was released this week stating that people playing video games were more sexist. Firstly, fuck you! And no video games do not cause sexism, just like they don’t cause violence. You would swear these issues weren’t prevalent before the advent of video games. And as an avid gamer for the entirety of my life, I can safely say this is a load of bullshit. So let me see if I understand this study correctly. The supposed study shows people who play video games are a lot are sexist than the person on the street who does not play video games. The first issue I have is the fact they used citations from a study conducted in 1998, that was 19 years ago plenty has changed in the video game industry since then.

The second issue is the fact that they used a single question to determine if a person was being sexist: Participants were asked the following Participants were asked the following likert style question: “A woman is made mainly for making and raising children”, from fully disagree (1) to fully agree (4), M = 1.53; SD = 0.9).” It is basically a loaded question. So what end up happening is that by saying you agree or disagree with it means you are accepting assumptions made by the question. Having said that, one question is certainly not enough to represent a subject as complex as sexism, especially a vague question like that. My third issue is that they didn’t control the amount of “sexist” content each subject was being exposed to.

Instead, they were lazy and just assumed that there was without checking the facts first:“There is plenty of sexist content on Television and in Video games.” And by their own admittance, they only actually polled a small demographic of people, who has been previously shown to have a high sexism ratio. I have fought the misconception that video games cause violence for decades, and most recently the assumption that all gamers are sexist bigots. It is definitely worrying to me that this stereotype is still being perpetuated by the media and studies like these. And that there are still people out there who willingly believe the media and poorly researched studies like these. Somewhere the line needs to be drawn when it comes to baseless accusations like these.